About us

Our vision is a sustainable market where scholarly content is freely accessible for each and every reader around the world.

From left to right: Max, Tom, Catherine, Sven and Philipp

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world. Our online platform provides libraries worldwide
with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.

The KU Team

Dr Sven Fund

Managing Director

In 2015, Sven founded fullstopp, a consulting and investment agency specialising in scholarly publishing as well as institutions in the educational space. Sven invests in and/or manages companies such as Sample of Science and Inkitt.com. Sven is a lecturer at Humboldt University and publishes on Open Access as well as the digital transformation of the publishing industry.

Max Mosterd

Head of Operations & Analytics

Max is passionate about making science and education more accessible to the wider public. Towards this end, he has founded a startup, published on bibliometrics and written his Master thesis on the pricing of scholarly content. He graduated from Erasmus University Rotterdam, having studied Economics before at the Harvard University Summer School and Utrecht University.

Catherine Anderson

Head of Sales

Catherine has worked for over 20 years in various Sales roles in Publishing and Library Supply in Germany. After working for international publishers such as Harcourt and Elsevier she headed up the German Sales Team for De Gruyter, based in Berlin. As a trade partner of Knowledge Unlatched when working for the German Library Supply Schweitzer Fachinformationen, she became familiar with the KU concept and passionate about spreading its message.

Tom Mosterd

Discovery & Account Manager

Tom studied International Business Management in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He completed an internship at a startup studio in Amsterdam, working with a variety of startups across different industries, before coming to KU where he developed an interest in scholarly publishing and a passion for OA

Philipp Hess

Publisher Relations

Philipp studied Engineering and Industrial Design in the Netherlands and Japan, before getting into scholarly content while working for Kiron, a platform that offers higher education to refugees. His goal is to make knowledge accessible to everyone, everywhere and to help shape the future dissemination of scholarly content

Elaine Lambert

North American Representative

Elaine has worked with libraries for the past 13 years, first through Informed Strategies, promoting books and journals from many publishers including the American Accounting Association, Begell House, Cornell, and UC Press to name a few before coming on board with KU in it’s Pilot program in 2013, and has worked with KU in every subsequent round since then. She has appreciated how much KU has grown and expanded over the years and has a strong desire to provide excellent customer service to the libraries she works with. Prior to working with libraries she was an Executive Assistant and database manager for several nonprofit organizations.

Susan Spilka

North American Representative

In addition to promoting Knowledge Unlatched to North American librarians, SUSAN SPILKA provides strategic communications, public relations, and research services for an array of scholarly societies, publishers, and technology services clients. Previously, she led Corporate Communications at Wiley and has played a role in many pioneering initiatives such as CHORUS, Crossref, and Patient Inform. She is also a co-founder of the Workplace Equity Project, which is building a community of diverse voices to advance equity in the scholarly publishing industry.

Victoria Rae

North American Representative

With over 13 years working in scholarly publishing, communications and library industries, Victoria is a dedicated and knowledgeable professional with experience across all subject disciplines and content formats. In addition to building relationships with North American libraries for Knowledge Unlatched, she also develops and launches journals for scholarly institutional European publishers. She is an active member of the publishing and library communities, with a strong passion towards professional development, having spent the last four years co-chairing the Society for Scholarly Publishing Career Development Committee.

Mary Marshall

North American Representative

Now an Associate with Knowledge Unlatched, Mary is delighted to again work with librarians to discover and implement a service that delivers value and is sustainable. Helping librarians solve their users’ information seeking challenges has been at the center of her career. She has worked in libraries, consortia, publishers and service providers including EBSCO, OCLC, Reed Elsevier, De Gruyter, LEXIS NEXIS and WebFeat. Highlights include working with LC editors on classification and developers on simultaneous searching of multiple sources to improve finding information whether the familiar or the obscure. From a local library association to the National Information Standards Organization, she has teamed with others to improve advance professional standards and improve how information is delivered.

Lydia Dawe

Library Ambassador, Australia & Aotearoa/New Zealand

Lydia has worked in public and academic libraries in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada for over a decade. She is currently the Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, Western Australia. All of her roles have shared a common purpose: finding innovative ways to connect people to information. As Library Ambassador for KU, her goals are to make meaningful connections with ANZ libraries, to better understand their needs, and to support the evolution of Open Access across the world.

Nina Weisweiler

Master Student - Assistant

Nina is currently finishing her Masters degree in Library and Information Science at Humboldt University of Berlin. During her studies she learned about the great importance of Open Access, therefore she aims to support its application within academia. Previously, she worked as a student assistant for the library of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik), where she was involved in a project to license electronic resources.

Piotr Godek

Software Engineer

Piotr is a software architect with over 15 years of experience in managing software development projects, leading software teams and building software for clients representing a range of domains.
He became interested in Open Access and joined Knowledge Unlatched, so now Piotr is the person behind the Knowledge Unlatched software platforms.
Piotr graduaded from Poznań​ University​ of​ Technology​, where he majored in Computer Science and then in Software​ Engineering​.
He also used​ to​ be​ a certified​ Project Management​ Professional​ (PMP).

KU Boards and Committees

KU Advisory Board

Dr Frances Pinter

Ambassador/Founder, Knowledge Unlatched

Dr Ralf Schimmer

Head of Scientific Information Provision and Deputy Director at the Max Planck Digital Library

David Worlock

Digital Publishing Strategist and co-chair of the Outsell Executive Program

Terry Ehling

Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press

Alison Mudditt

Chief Executive Officer at PLOS

Library Steering Committee

Dr Paul Ayris

Director of UCL Library Services, University College London, President of LIBER and Chair of the Board of SPARC Europe

Louis Houle

Director of Collections, McGill University, Canada

Elizabeth Kirk

John Unsworth

University Librarian, University of Virginia Library, USA

Wilhelm Widmark

Library Director, Stockholm University, Sweden

Network

KU Research is a close-knit team of researchers and publishing industry practitioners working together to help realise the possibilities of digital technology and Open Access for specialist scholarly books and the communities that care about them.

EBSCO is dedicated to developing customizable services, supporting the technology needs of our customers and creating strong user experiences to help libraries and other institutions support their end users and improve access to information.

EDItEUR is the international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book, e-book and serials sectors.

Jisc Collections is the negotiation and licensing service of Jisc that supports the procurement of digital content for higher education and research institutions in the UK.

Knowledge Base+ (KB+) is a service from Jisc Collections that aims to help UK libraries manage their e-resources more efficiently by providing accurate publication, subscription, licence and management information.

Language Science Press publishes high quality, peer-reviewed open-access books in linguistics. All publications are free for both authors and readers.

LYRASIS partners with member libraries, archives and museums and other cultural heritage organizations to create, access and manage information with an emphasis on digital content, while building and sustaining collaboration, enhancing operations and technology, and increasing buying power.

The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) is a central scientific service unit within the Max Planck Society (MPG) dedicated to the strategic planning, development and operation of the digital infrastructures necessary for providing the institutes with scientific information and for supporting web-based scholarly communication.

The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books and it operates two platforms, the OAPEN Library, a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books, and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a discovery service for OA books.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association aims to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally, across all subjects and disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation.

OCLC is a global library cooperative that provides shared technology services, original research and community programs for its membership and the library community at large.

PaperHive introduces seamless discussion of research papers directly in the browser, embedded in the regular workflow. This enables researchers to attach questions, corrections, formulas, figures, further literature, code, or data directly to the original text where everyone can benefit from it.

Portico is among the largest community-supported digital archives in the world. Working with libraries and publishers, Portico preserve e-journals, e-books, and other electronic scholarly content to ensure researchers and students will have access to it in the future.

ProQuest is committed to empowering researchers and librarians around the world. ProQuest is a key partner for content holders of all types, preserving and enabling access to their rich and varied information.

The Queensland University of Technology is a founding library of Knowledge Unlatched.

The CLOCKSS project, under the auspices of Stanford University, is a peer-to-peer network that develops and supports an open source system allowing libraries to collect, preserve and provide their readers with access to material published on the Web. Its main goal is the digital preservation.

The University of Melbourne is a founding library of Knowledge Unlatched.

The University of Western Australia is a founding library of Knowledge Unlatched.